Introducing Source Guides by Erin Kissane.
From the post:
Topical collections for readers new and experienced
In the two-and-a-bit years we’ve been publishing Source, we’ve built up a solid archive of project walkthroughs, introductions to new tools and libraries, and case studies. They’re all tagged and searchable, but as with most archives presented primarily in reverse-chron order, pieces tend to attract less attention once they fall off the first page of a given section.
We’ve also been keeping an eye out for ways of inviting in readers who haven’t been following along since we started Source, and who may be a little newer to journalism code—either to the “code” or the “journalism” part.
Introducing Guides
Earlier this year, we got the OpenNews team together for a few workdays in space graciously lent to us by the New York Times, and in our discussion of the two above challenges, we hit on the idea of packaging articles from our archives into topical “guides” that could highlight the most useful and evergreen of our articles on a given subject. Ryan extended our CMS to allow for the easy creation of topical collections via the admin interface, and we started collecting and annotating pieces a few weeks ago.
Today, we’re launching Source Guides with three topics: News Apps Essentials and Better Mapping, which are just what they say on the tin; and the Care and Feeding of News Apps, a beyond-the-basics Guide that considers the introduction, maintenance, and eventual archiving of code projects in newsrooms. In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out a few more batches of Guides, and then adding to the list organically as new themes coalesce in the archives.
Reminds me of the vertical files (do they still call them that?) reference librarians used to maintain. A manila folder with articles, photocopies, etc., centered on some particular topic. Usually one that came up every year or of local interest.
Not all that far from a topic map except that you have to read all the text to collate related pieces together and every reader repeats that task.
Having said that, this is quite a remarkable project that merits your interest and support.
I first saw this in a tweet by Bryan Connor.